Law & Disorder —

Congress to probe FCC with red hot questions

Bipartisan members of the House Commerce Committee announced a full …

The FCC—and Chairman Kevin Martin in particular—are in hot water with Congress over the way that the Commission is run. While Martin was at CES, telling all who would listen that the FCC will investigate Comcast's traffic-shaping practices, the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced a formal investigation of the FCC. The news couldn't be more welcome to the industries that the FCC regulates.

The Associated Press reports that a bipartisan group of Representatives from the House Energy and Commerce Committee yesterday sent a letter to Martin. The group says that Congress will see if the FCC's dealings are "being conducted in a fair, open, efficient and transparent manner."

The House hasn't been pleased with the FCC lately. Last February, the Commerce Committee grilled Martin about the state of US broadband, the AT&T/BellSouth merger, and lingering allegations of waste and fraud in the Universal Service Fund that pays for phone and Internet service in low-income and rural communities and schools.

Dingell takes on the FCC

Later in the year, Congress was irked again by findings from the Government Accountability Office that showed inconsistencies in FCC rulemaking procedures. The GAO report found that FCC insiders routinely gave inappropriate information to companies with pending FCC business. The report led Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) to complain, "When the 'corporate insiders' and 'K-Street' crowd have the inside track on decisions critical to telecommunications, media, broadband or wireless policy, then the public and consumers are at an inherent disadvantage."

On December 3, Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), the chair of the Commerce Committee, sent a letter to Martin (PDF) saying that "I am rapidly losing confidence that the Commission has been conducting its affairs in an appropriate manner." Dingell worried that the Commission was "short-circuiting procedural norms" and that other commissioners were not being given information about pending actions.

Dingell sent Martin a set of questions, but the responses were apparently not enough to satisfy him or other members of the committee. Now, the committee's irritation has produced a full-blown investigation, one that could lead Congress to shake up the FCC's procedures and mandate.

That would please the industries regulated by the FCC. Multichannel News reports that AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast all bashed the agency in a CES panel yesterday, with each group wanting to see major changes in the way that the FCC operates.

The cable operators are upset about the FCC's attempt to regulate their industry, along with the Commission's decision last year to nullify many of their exclusive contracts with apartment buildings. The telephone companies aren't thrilled about the FCC's 700MHz auction conditions (Verizon even sued), and everyone wants the FCC to keep away from their traffic monitoring and shaping practices.

Perhaps the strongest criticism came from Verizon's Tom Tauke, who argued that the FCC just isn't set up to deal with the modern world.

"The FCC is structured about broadcast, cable and telephone," he said. "That isn't the world we are live in, and it isn't the world we are going to. The FCC has to be overhauled for the Internet world."